(The forest would like a word with you.)
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Amy awoke about the same time as yesterday. She stretched, exhaled, and shoved her comforter away, in the process displacing a bunch of paper to the floor: a crossword puzzle page and a well-thumbed paperback. Amy let them lie; after all, it’d been years since she’d been able to successfully bend over before downing a morning’s cup of coffee.
The trees watched Amy sidestep all that snubbed paper and rolled their eyes.
She poled stiffly from the bed to the bathroom, slightly swaying on legs that seems to have no knee joints. She spun up the shower’s main knob while discarding more paper, the scented paper wrapped around a new bar of soap. As she waited for the shower’s moody hot water, Amy plucked paper from paper: she pulled a soft, perfumed piece of paper from a colored cardboard paper box and wiped her nose. The box was labeled “Kleenex.”
“Hnnh,” she thought. “I’m awake less than five minutes, and already a misspelling.”
On the floor beside Amy’s bed, the 250-odd pieces of paper lay there, sullen. The paperback noticed another book, forgotten beneath the bed for who knows how long.
The trees noted bitterly that a book’s pages…the paper that made a book, a book…were often referred to as “leaves.”
The trees did not find that funny.
Eventually, the shower did its revival magic, and Amy toweled and dressed, tearing a paper wrapper away from a dry-cleaned blouse. Returning to her bedroom, she leaned and retrieved the crossword and paperback and tossed them on to her bedside table, next to several more collections of bound paper. The trees noticed that Amy’s fondness for former trees seemed to run to a pattern: books with titles like “Love on the Rocks” and “Mary’s Final Answer.”
The trees sighed. Books, in general, were bad enough. But so many similar books – that was just rude. The trees wished…and not for the first time…they wished they could talk to Amy and other humans, other readers like her, and convince them to stop collecting all those redundant books. It just wasn’t necessary. Did a tree really have to die for “Love on the Rocks?”
The Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges, once said there are really only four kinds of stories to tell, and everything else is simply variation. The four kinds of stories that can be told, according to Borges?
- a love story between two people
- a love story between three people
- a struggle for power
- a voyage
Four books, muttered the trees. Four. That’s all you people need.
But according to a software engineer working on the Google Books project, over time mankind has collectively published some 130 million books, most of them by Stephen King, who’s written two more books just since you sat down to read this.
All that paper, groused the trees. And that’s just titles. Don’t even get me STARTED on copies.
But the trees were practical, which is difficult to do when squirrels climb on you and you can’t move. They realized that even if people stopped reading altogether – and social media was busily working on that – that would not signal the end of Earth’s obsession with paper.
Amy scooped coffee from a paper bag, poured in in a paper filter, brewed a cup and flavored it with a dollop of milk from a tall paper container embossed with an animated cow and some kid’s photo. Now fortified by caffeine, she shook cereal from a large paper box, doused it with more milk, toasted a bagel pulled from another paper bag, and coated it with butter (wrapped in wax paper).
Amy collected the dry cleaning paper, the soap paper, the various paper wrappers from breakfast, and wiped down the table with a paper towel. She looked over yesterday’s mail, a handful of paper catalogs, paper flyers, and several dozen paper envelopes stuffed with paper. Most of the paper went straight to the trash bin which, since it was Thursday, she rolled out to the curb.
Walking back down her driveway, Amy thought she heard a voice. She paused and looked around, but there was nothing there except the trees.
And on the way back inside, Amy leaned over on her front stoop and grabbed…
…the paper.